(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image coding apparatus which compresses a still image with high efficiency, an image decoding apparatus, an image processing apparatus and methods thereof.
(2) Description of the Related Art
As a method for compression coding a still image with high efficiency, the JPEG and the JPEG 2000 are set as standards (for example, see ITU-T Rec. T.81, Information Technology—Digital Compression and Coding of Continuous-Tone Still Images—, 1992.). In addition, the moving picture coding standards such as MPEG-2, H.264 and others employs an intra coding method in which the image which is to be an access point is coded without referring to other image is used.
An image completion method for generating a completed image by removing a part of image from the image taken by a digital camera and the like and covering the removed part with completion pixels (For example, I. Drori, D. Chohen-Or, H. Yeshurun, “Fragment-based image completion”, Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2003, pp. 303-312 (2003)). In the conventional methods, a similar part is searched from the part other than removed part in an image, and the removed part is filled using the pixels in the similar part.
The super resolution image processing has been proposed as another image processing method. The super resolution image processing is a method for generating a highly accurate high resolution image by generating high-frequency content which is not included in a low resolution image, and adding the high-frequency component to the low resolution image. As examples of the super resolution image processing, methods in which present high resolution image is used as an example (For example, A. Hertzmann, C. Jacobs, N. Oliver, B. Curless, D. Salesin, “Image Analogies”, SIGGRAPH 2001 Conference Proceedings, and S. Baker and T. Kanade, “Limits on Super-Resolution and How to Break Them”, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 24, No. 9, Pages: 1167-1183-, September 2002.) and a method in which a transformation table from a low resolution image to high resolution image have been proposed (For example, W. T. Freeman, T. R. Jones and E. C. Pasztor, “Example-based Super-Resolution,” IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 56-65, March/April 2002).